Field of Mars (The Complete Novel)

by David Rollins

  “If we stay we will be killed,” observed Cassius Longinus.

  The governor nodded. In truth, it was doubtful anyone would leave the vicinity of Carrhae alive. “What about the proconsul? Did you see him fall?”

  “I saw a lot of blood and many swords stabbing at the Parthians, but I am not certain of the proconsul’s fate. I think we can assume the worst.”

  *

  Two days later, the town of Carrhae was not only tense, but also exhausted. Rufinius and his men, indeed all the legionaries, had manned the walls without sleep or rest of any kind since the Parthians had once again tricked them after promising safety, killing many of their officers. They had been waiting for the Parthians to attack ever since, but so far not a shot had been fired. Ringing the town all this time had been a sparse number of mounted archers – lookouts. There would be no repeat of the first night when all the surviving legates and senior officers had slipped away under the cover of darkness, taking every last remaining horse that wasn’t lame, and leaving the legionaries to fight it out with an enemy who had promised them only death.

  “Cunni,” Rufinius muttered and spat over the wall.

  *

  The sun rose above the desert plain into a waiting clear blue sky. Spāhbed Surenas woke refreshed from his rest in the harem, despite the antics of several of his favorites that went far into the night. He washed, dressed and then offered libations to Ahura Mazda, promising that all he did was for the glory of the god. He then breakfasted on dates and cheese and the juices of several fruits.

  “All preparations are ready, Spāhbed,” said Volodates, waiting outside the tent. “We await your pleasure.”

  “There is no pleasure in any of this,” Surenas answered. He stood and walked out of his tent and followed the captain of horse to the execution taking place among the other tents pitched nearby.

  A hardly pleasurable, but fitting – almost poetic – end had at last been settled on for the Roman proconsul. Crassus was tied face up on a framework, and still alive, though the man’s mind was given to wander. When his final moments came, Surenas wanted Crassus to know. He bent over the naked old man, his sunburned flesh marked by the angry wound in his side. So this was the world’s richest man?

  “Proconsul Crassus, are you thirsty?”

  Feebly, Crassus looked up at Surenas and nodded, his tongue and lips swollen by the desert sun.

  The spāhbed took one of the familiar gold cups with the Zoroastrian sun on its flank, recovered from the proconsul’s possessions, dipped it into a firkin of murky blacksmith’s water and poured the contents into Crassus’s mouth. The proconsul choked and coughed.

  “No, you are still thirsty,” Surenas insisted. But instead of returning the cup to its golden tray, Surenas dropped it into the crucible sitting on a nearby forge and nodded at the smith who then worked the bellows. Flames surged around the side of the crucible and the golden cup quickly dissolved to bright golden flowing liquid. Surenas dropped the other cups into the crucible and watched as they too melted like wax.

  “Yours is a particular thirst that I believe will take much to be quenched, so I have something special for you.” He nodded to the smith who grasped the crucible with tongs, brought it to Crassus and poured the molten gold into the proconsul’s parched mouth. The liquid metal hissed and steamed and caused the man’s flesh to bubble and catch fire.

  “Gold is what brought you here, and with gold you shall leave.”

  Crassus bucked and strained against his restraints, his eyes wild with pain, his throat burned away and unable to make any sounds other than a choking gurgle.

  Episode II

  Appias

  Li-ch’ien, province of Gansu, Chin

  a.d. IV Non. Sept. 750 AUC

  2 September, 4 BC

  In this manner the proconsul died, the molten gold burning away his insides so that he choked on his own steaming blood, killed by the thing that drove him, the thing he loved the most. In the panic that preceded Crassus’s capture, not many of the party of 100 officers made it back inside the gates of Carrhae. Opportunism saved Legate Cassius Longinus’s life and it was the proconsul’s own vanity that saved mine. “I brought you here to bear witness to my triumph, not record my humiliation,” Crassus had told me before venturing forth from the gates of Carrhae to meet with his fate. Thus I was left behind on the wall to observe the slaughter with the legionaries.

  I cannot tell you whether Cassius Longinus later made it to Syria as he had planned, for news of his death or even his life (if indeed it continued) has not been noteworthy enough to reach my ears in the years that have since passed.

  The legionaries remaining in Carrhae mounted a vigorous but brief defense that lasted barely three days. In the end the town was given easily to the Parthians, betrayed from within by an unknown citizen, as indeed Surenas himself had predicted. Surrounded and overrun by archers and charged by cataphracts, the legionaries had little choice but to throw down their swords, face the ignominy of capture, and place their lives in the hands of Surenas and hope for mercy. Some might call this cowardice, but a surer death was the only alternative. As Primus Pilus Hadrianus had said, at least with life there was hope.

  The greatest insult of all – greater even than the ignominious defeat of a larger force led by one of Rome’s most favored sons – was the capture of the aquilas, the eagles, the symbols of power the Roman Republic carried at the head of each legion. I can only imagine the consternation and handwringing that situation must have caused in the Senate when news of it reached Rome.

  Of the force that made up Proconsul Crassus’s defensive square, barely 7,000 legionaries survived and made it to Carrhae. Around 20,000 of his army had been killed by Surenas’s men in the various engagements, or succumbed to privation. The legions left behind on the wrong side of the river before the main battle had turned and fled west into the desert, but some of these legionaries and much of the soldiers’ baggage train was overrun by Surenas’s men and captured. In all, the spāhbed sent more than 10,000 men and women to the slave markets of Babylon to swell his coffers, and his reputation. I know of this because I was among them.

  And this brings me to a point I feel compelled to state for the record (assuming it will ever be read by someone other than my slave, Viridia): I have heard much made over the years, by everyone from gossipers to so-called scholars, of the Roman defeat at Carrhae – how 10,000 Parthians overwhelmed 40,000 Romans, renowned as the best soldiers in the world. This is an assertion I wish to contest though I know I stand on my own in so doing. I feel I can say with complete authority that it was in fact 10,000 Parthians that defeated a mere 1,000 Roman auxiliary cavalry, equipped with inferior weaponry. I state this because, in reality, the proconsul’s 39,000 legionaries, blinded and choked by the dust, were mere bystanders to the battle and more or less stationary targets for Parthian arrows. Crassus and his legions were doomed from the moment they stepped out onto a flat plain affording no cover.

  And if anyone destroyed Rome that day, it was not so much Surenas but Abgar, the man who ensured Crassus brought his army to this place of annihilation. I can tell you with absolute confidence that Publius suspected the man of duplicitous ways. He was also certain that the Arab chief was the agent of Pompey. The animosity between Pompey and Crassus was both well known and the subject of many jibes. Was Abgar indeed in the pay of Pompey? I shall never know, but the calamity of Carrhae would scarcely have happened but for his destructive influence.

  “Viridia! Where are you going? Come back. Oh, you’ve had enough, so that’s it?”

  Perhaps she is right. It has been a long week and I am tired. I received word from one of the secretaries from the City of Perpetual Peace, saying that my old friend Protector-General Chen Tang would soon be making the long and arduous journey west. I must keep up my strength for his arrival. While I will, of course, be delighted to see him, I fear he comes out of pity after Viridia sent him a message with certain news. She deserves a beating for sending
it, if I could only bring myself to have such a beautiful creature thrashed. But it serves me right for bringing the woman with me to select the marble for my sarcophagus, and then discussing with the sculptor motifs for its design in her presence. Perhaps I secretly wanted her to know of my state. It would be sad to end this life to have not a solitary mourner.

  As I look up from my notes, scribblings collected over all these years, I see Viridia standing before me naked. Yes, yes, it is time for my bath … I must confess that as my eyes follow the curve of her waist and the swell of her young breasts, I wish there was energy in this old body for more.

  *

  It has been several days since I sat down and added to this history, but I am back with you now. Reading over the previous entry, I must tell you that my bath went unexpectedly well. I have discovered that while reliving the past is tiring, it is also uplifting, as Viridia will attest. Perhaps it puts me in touch with my youth, folding this old decrepit end of time into a younger, more vigorous, me.

  So, after bathing, Viridia took me to see Apothecary Wu. He is the physician who administers my cures and, as you will soon discover, I have known him for many years. Indeed, he once saved my life, but it is unlikely that he will be able to repeat this service. Wu’s skin is parched and cracked like mud baked in the sun. We are around the same age, but he looks to be around a hundred. I suspect he is a victim of his own balms and medicaments, which he often tests on himself before administering to patients. For my ailments (and there is a litany), I am to breath the smoke emitted by a range of dried plants, insect and animal matter thrown over hot coals. I must tell you that it is truly disgusting. There is also a potion that forces me to throw up, and often there is blood in it. Wu claims this is evidence of the poison my own body is producing to end my days and he insists that it is better expelled. I suspect it’s the potion itself that causes the bleeding and hurries me toward my tomb.

  But everyone swears by Apothecary Wu, tutored in medicine by the son of a famed physician executed for the illegal practice of witchcraft, the edict emanating from no lesser a personage than Emperor Wu himself. So what is an illustrious man like Apothecary Wu doing in this outpost, you may ask. There are mandarins in the City of Perpetual Peace who suspect him of similar crimes purely by extension, so he came to this outpost of Li-ch’ien, which, while far from the Royal court, still offers some civilities. The cries of witchcraft are all nonsense, of course. As I said, we go back a long way, Wu and I, but I will come to that.

  Viridia is ready, her paint brush hovering above the silk, her eyes staring in my direction beneath hooded lids because here I am again, prattling on like a slave over the washing. But I did warn her as I warned you: when you get to my age, the path to conclusion is rarely straight.

  “Viridia, where was I …?”

  “Surenas promised annihilation to those who remained behind the walls,” she says, “but that is not how it ended.”

  “Yes … quite right. After the capitulation of Carrhae, the spāhbed gathered the survivors, joined them to the baggage train, and marched the column of defeated Roman legionaries across the desert toward Babylon. And it was on this leg of the journey that I first met Rufinius, the Alexandrian.”

  South and east of Carrhae

  a.d. Id. Mai. 701 AUC

  (15 May, 53 BC)

  XIII

  It was late in the afternoon, the desert sun disappearing behind a towering bank of purple and gray clouds, dry lightning bolts flickering through them, taunting the desert with the unfulfilled promise of rain. Rufinius watched unseeing as his feet kicked up the dust with each step, adding to the thick cloud of it streaming from the column trudging across the sand. He reflected on how much more difficult it was to endure the heat and penury when the heart was beaten. The march had continued for three days now, from sunrise to sunset, the captured resting only at night. How much farther must they go? The dust again caught in Rufinius’s throat and he coughed painfully, his mouth raw and dry, his discomfort matched in equal measure by all those around him.

  Some of the men had started drinking their own urine, pissing into their cupped hands, believing the conservation of fluid would also preserve their lives. Rufinius had tried it once, but the taste induced a fit of vomiting that had left him exhausted and thirstier than ever, so he had not repeated it.

  “It’s yous!” exclaimed a man who shuffled into the line beside Dentianus. He pointed at Rufinius. “Yous the Alexandrian!”

  Rufinius ignored the statement as if he hadn’t heard it said.

  “One of the men in your century once pointed you out to me, said yous was the best swordsman in the army.”

  “Shut your mouth, landica face, if you can’t talk proper,” Libo advised the man who then broke into a coughing fit, the dust overcoming his exuberance.

  “Crawl back to into your mother’s cunnus,” suggested Carbo.

  A rag wrapped around the man’s head dislodged to reveal a shallow crusty scalp wound teeming with flies where his ear used to be. When he had recovered from the fit sufficiently he said, in an accent Rufinius couldn’t place, “My name is Marcus Lepidus. Third Legion, Fifth Century, and decanus of the third contubernium.” He rearranged the bandage over his wound. “Maybe yous haven’t noticed, but we are unguarded and yet we all march as if chained beneath a yoke. I have ten men. All are good fighters but our centurion, optio, and tesserarius have paid the Ferryman. We need a leader. More would join us if yous would step forward.”

  Rufinius finally turned to look at him. “Join you to what? Escape? Or are your plans grander still?”

  “Of course escape. At night, when the Parthians hide away in their tents.”

  “Decanus Lepidus, look around. It’s not the Parthians who keep us in line, or the occasional legionary half buried in the sand who greets our lines in the morning with a black carrion bird perched on his head. The desert itself is a better guard than all the squadrons of mounted Parthians. As for my so-called ability with a gladius, what could even a cohort of the Republic’s mightiest swordsmen do for you when there is no water to drink? And while we talk of swordsmanship, what weapons are you placing in your legionaries’ hands? Tell me. I see no steel anywhere.”

  “You surprise me, Centurion Rufinius. Listening to the rumors I expected more from yous. Who knows what opportunities lie beyond the next dune? In this column we do one thing only – mooch toward certain slavery.”

  “We’re worth something alive. That’s why they give us water, sphincter lips,” Libo interjected. “Or haven’t you worked that out?”

  “Just enough to keep us moving,” Rufinius said, “but not enough to give us strength. Leave the column and the little water they give us to keep us breathing will dry up completely. And out on the desert there is nowhere to hide from their archers. You will die, as will the men who follow you, and we will see you buried up to your necks for the birds’ morning feast. You forget, Decanus – we walk in this dust a defeated army because someone forgot that a legionary’s greatest weapon is his wits, not the edge on his sword.”

  “Like so many heroes, Centurion, the reality is disappointing,” the one-eared man said bitterly. “When I reach freedom, I will be sure to spread your fame.” An instant later he was gone into the dust.

  The man’s rebuke cut Rufinius, but he knew he was in the right. Only a few of the more foolhardy legionaries had considered escape seriously enough to attempt it. Perhaps some had made it to freedom, but Rufinius doubted it. No one in the column knew where they were in relation to any known landmarks. The only thing they knew for certain was that they moved generally south and east, the water rationed in a miserly fashion, and the food almost non-existent. But somewhere ahead, surely, must be the Euphrates.

  On two mornings of this march so far, recaptured legionaries that had attempted escape were found buried in the sand up to their necks, their heads left exposed for the large black desert carrion birds that flapped their black wings as they gouged at eyes, tongues, and
cheeks. On the desert plain, as all had learned the hard way, there was nowhere to hide. And so the defeated legionaries of Proconsul Crassus shuffled on, mad with thirst, but compliant. The guards that oversaw them were few. The mounted Parthians interacted with the captured men not at all, standing far off from the column, their bows around their backs, their anonymous faces kept hidden by the darkened shadows beneath their helmets.

  “He made a good point,” said a man walking ahead of Rufinius. “There are few if any officers of the army left alive. Perhaps you are the only one.”

  “What does it matter?” Rufinius replied.

  “What you told the man about Roman wits – it’s true.”

  “How would you know, ass face?” said Carbo, walking beside the man. “You don’t even wear the uniform of a legionary. For all we know you’re a dancing girl.”

  “A dog-ugly dancing girl with a beard,” corrected Dentianus.

  “Enough talk, worms,” Fabianus commanded. “Save your breath.”

  “Let ’em go,” Rufinius said between coughs. “Passes the time.”

  The optio shook his head, displeasure weighing heavy on his features. He slowed his step so that he fell back through the lines of shambling men.

  “There a problem with Fabianus?” Rufinius asked, noting the man’s anger.

  “Yes,” Dentianus replied, his voice low. “The problem is that he’s older than you, and has just as much experience as you and yet the primipilus passed over him when looking to promote optios to the centurion ranks,” Libo told him.

  Rufinius grunted. Given their current situation, a man’s station within the legion seemed less than important.

  “So who are you anyway, cunnus?” Carbo prompted the man beside him. “You don’t wear the tunic of a legionary and your accent places you from Rome herself.”